1983.08.21: Latwii on acceptance, treating others

[rva_jeremy]

Acceptance for me does not start with accepting an outer situation.
Accepting for me starts with accepting what the outer situation makes me feel like.
When this has happened, and many times this is a very challenging task, acceptance of the outer situation comes naturally. An impulse for action may arise then or maybe not.

On the other hand, non-acceptance is the refusal to experience what i experience right now.

Yup. This is a reasonably fresh, pregnant insight for me, and it's really reassuring that so many others see it the same way.

I think most of us believe that, if we let ourselves get whisked away in the emotional tides that wash upon our shores, we will lose ourselves. That's because in a way, we will. We will no longer cling in quite the same way to what Dr. Tyman calls our "resistances" that help us demarcate self and other. That is progress, but it is also a kind of death.

So I'm just trying to take it slowly. It really seems to be as simple as letting yourself feel things, even if you have to feel them out of conjunction with the causing event (i.e. balancing exercises later in the evening). And then you kind of let information tumble out of the emotional resonance, knowing that most of the learning isn't something you're going to directly witness. But it is painstakingly slow most of the time, and I get the sense that this process operates on a different time scale than our waking consciousness. That's probably just as well since it allows us to back away from the commitment to limited identity and feeling over a timeframe, instead of dropping it all at once.

As an aside, I wonder whether this isn't part of the utility of time: a mechanism by which the intensity of emotion is rationed by displacing it across a continuous-seeming sequence of experiences, moods, mindsets, phenomena, etc. It feels like experiencing a timeless moment when my attention is completely trained on the present moment. But most of my waking experience is one of preoccupation, acting according to patterns of behavior, dealing with the same old hangups and biases, etc. Time seems to have more sway when I'm less conscious and less sway when I'm more aware and present. What if what we experience as time in third density is in part what we call the thread that strings together these moments of connection and awareness, a kind of "cocoon" the true self gestates in as it becomes more and more willing and able to meet reality as it is?